Quotes from Tom Robbins

The kingdom of formal ideas will always be a weak neighbor to the kingdom of thrills

true freedom was an internal condition not subject to the vagaries of politics. Freedom could not be owned. Therefore, it could not be appropriated.

Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver. In fact, the person who maintains absolute standards of good and evil usually is the maniac with the revolver.

How different conditions would be today in the Middle East, how much saner and safer the entire earth might be, had those Christians not defiled a civilization too advanced for their arrogant little minds to understand.

You gotta come home. Be with me. After what we been through! We—we signed into that motel as man and wife! You put—you put your mouth on me. Shoulda checked the fine print, hon, whispered Ellen Cherry, trying to assist him back onto the ivy vines as quietly as possible. That blow job did not come with a lifetime warranty.

this lonely, uncompromising, obsessive tug-of-war with presumed reality, this is what art is all about.

Poetry is nothing more than an intensification or illumination of common objects and everyday events until they shine with their singular nature, until we can experience their power, until we can follow their steps in the dance, until we can discern what parts they play in the Great Order of Love. How is this done? By fucking around with the syntax.

their kiss was like a paper airplane landing on the moon.

Actually, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.

Hitchhiking is not a sport. It is not an art. It certainly isn't work, for it requires no particular ability not does it produce anything of value. It's an adventure, I suppose, but a shallow ignoble adventure.

When I was younger, before this layoff which has nearly finished me, I hitchhiked one hundred and twenty-seven hours without stopping, without food or sleep, crossed the continent twice in six days, cooled my thumbs in both oceans and caught rides after midnight on unlighted highways, such was my skill, persuasion, rhythm. I set records and immediately cracked them; went farther, faster than any hitchhiker before or since.

When we feel incomplete, we might search for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we may blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment.

Is this blasphemy, my lord? I think not. Those who crafted me, be they gods or demons, crafted this mind that shapes my resistance to their schemes. Surely they were wise enough, at the wheel where I was thrown, to anticipate future resistance in the heart they were abuilding.

It was wonderful, Pris. What was, honey? The meeting? The champagne? The eclipse, said Ricki. It was probably the most real thing I've ever seen, but it was also like a dream. You know what I mean? Real and unreal, beautiful and strange, like a dream. It got me high as a kite, but it didn't last long enough. It ended too soon and left nothing behind. That's how it is with dreams, said Priscilla. They're the perfect crime.

When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat.

I have hitched and hiked over every state and half the nations, through blizzards and under rainbows, in deserts and cities, backward and side-ways, upstairs, downstairs and in my lady's chamber.

In this world that God (or Mother Nature) created, it is always hazard and novelty-hazard and novelty-which assert themselves, thereby rendering notions of fixity absurd. Incongruously enough, however, when we allow ourselves to fully accept uncertainty, to embrace and cultivate it even, then we actually can begin to feel within ourselves the presence of an Absolute. The person who cannot welcome ambiguity cannot welcome God.

Okay, it is what it is and I am what I it, but its isness and my itness seem to be stretching the meaning of is and it.

every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.

The minute you land in New Orleans, something wet and dark leaps on you and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get that aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off.

But having acquired a taste for solitude, each of them spent days separate and alone, Leigh-Cheri in the attic, Bernard in the pantry. Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.

religion is a paramount contributor to human misery. It is not merely the opium of the masses, it is the cyanide.

I don't think I've ever felt more disoriented and alone. Or more thoroughly, serenely, at home. Every true romantic will know what I mean.

Christ said that illumination is found only by putting everything one has in jeopardy. Thou, of all humans, should understand the courage that is required to reject the secure blessings of society in order to woo the unpredictable ecstasies of the solitary soul. It is true that Christ had little enthusiasm for dance or copulation, that he took 'right' and 'wrong' too seriously and set himself apart from the natural world